What does Laura Palmer whisper to Dale Cooper in ‘Twin Peaks’?
Transforming the idea of what TV could be, Twin Peaks, created by David Lynch and Mark Frost in 1990, was a crime series that took part in a reality that bordered on the dreamworld. In the quiet titular town situated on the green hills of Washington, the body of a young girl named Laura Palmer is discovered in the very first episode, sparking a real-life pop-culture obsession to find her murderer.
Truly unlike any TV series that had preceded it, Twin Peaks was a crime show that gave fans only cryptic clues to solve its mystery, with the ‘whodunnit’ narrative almost being secondary to the dreamlike style that pervaded. Eventually, at the start of season two, Palmer’s killer is revealed to be her father, who was possessed by an evil force at the time of her death, only for the show to continue with a handful more episodes that delve deeper into the darkness of the town.
Season two ends with Dale Cooper succumbing to the very same force of evil that possessed the father of Laura to kill her, leaving fans with a cliffhanger that would last for 26 years. In 2017, Lynch made a long-awaited comeback with Twin Peaks: The Return, a series that only added to the mythos of the programme, giving us more questions to answer rather than providing us with solutions to queries.
If you’re still waiting for Lynch to explain himself in regards to the series’ meaning, you’ll be waiting an incredibly long time, with the director repeatedly stating that to explain something is to kill it. “I don’t ever explain it,” he told The Guardian, “Because it’s not a word thing. It would reduce it, make it smaller,” and, while in many ways he’s right, this has led to online fans to draw inconclusive evidence together to try and make sense of the enigma.
Of the many mysteries that germinated during the release of Twin Peaks: The Return, one of the most highly discussed was what exactly Laura Palmer whispered to Dale Cooper while the pair of them were sitting in the Red Room. A copy of the same scene in the final episode of the first series, the dream sequence draws to a close when Laura gets up from her chair and whispers something in Cooper’s ear.
While in the finale of the first series, we don’t know what Laura has told Cooper, we discover that she actually says, “My father killed me,” during a fascinating sequence in the prequel film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, released in 1992. Yet, in the latest series, Twin Peaks: The Return, we are not given such an answer, leaving fans to pick up the pieces and try to formulate an answer for themselves.
What does Laura Palmer whisper to Dale Cooper in Twin Peaks: The Return?
There is currently no conclusive answer as to what Laura whispers to Dale Cooper in the final episode of Twin Peaks: The Return, yet several theories create some interesting trains of thought. It’s safe to say that we can more than likely remove the idea that she repeated “My father killed me,” as she did in Fire Walk with Me, with Cooper giving a distinctively different reaction in the newer series.
Disturbed and shocked by her words, which is certainly not helped by the fact that she screams and levitates out of the red room once she’s finished, it’s more likely that Laura tells him something entirely different.
Perhaps the most obvious answer comes as a result of Cooper’s question shortly before the whisper, asking Laura, “When can I go?”. The obvious answer as to what Laura utters is a direct response to this question, and, considering Cooper’s shocked reaction, it’s likely something dark that he doesn’t particularly want to hear.
It’s therefore possible that Laura utters something like “You can never leave,” pointing to the fact that Cooper is inextricably tied to this strange underworld that only the select few from Twin Peaks can access. Even if he does manage to escape the hellscape of the Red Room, this answer also points to the fact that he is only ever a stones-throw from re-entering it again, just as he enters an alternate reality with Laura Palmer at the climax of the Twin Peaks: The Return.
The other theory links in with this manic finale, with some suggesting that Palmer whispered, “You can’t save me” in the first episode, linking in with the fact that as hard as Cooper tries to prevent her death, he will never succeed. Unable to let go of the fact that he could never have saved her, Twin Peaks is something of a journey into Cooper’s personal turmoil as he realises that he is, indeed, only human. At the end of the series, when he thinks he has saved Laura’s future, it is revealed that the pair of them are in some sort of hellish alternate reality, suggesting that she, indeed, cannot be saved.
